Proposed SKOS extensions for bioportal terminology services

Abstract

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal provides common access for browsing and querying a large set of ontologies that are commonly used in biomedical communities. One of our missions is to align lexical features (i.e., textual definitions) that are commonly used in these ontologies across different representation formats with standard tags and to represent them in a standard way to the users. The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a recommendation of the World-Wide-Web Consortium (W3C) for a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems on the Semantic Web. The BioPortal is in the process of adopting SKOS in the backend representation for its content. During this process, we discovered that there exists a set of commonly-used lexical features shared by the biomedical ontologies that SKOS does not yet represent. In this paper, we discuss our proposed SKOS extensions to cover this set of commonly used lexical features, the rationales, and the detailed description of each proposed construct. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.